"This book tells the story of one of the earliest long-running boarding schools in country New South Wales. Its origins in the 1860-70s reflect the buoyancy of a gold-rich, wool-rich colony and a vision of respectability and prosperity for the sons of Irish settlers of the south-west. St Pat's was also part of the Catholic Church's response to the nineteenth-century state's push into education, a response of major consequence for the Church and Australian society. In 1897 the College passed from diocesan control into the keeping of the Christian Brothers; for a generation it was their prize possession in New South Wales. This largest of the men's teaching orders both favoured St Pat's and made it part of a culture of the hard-pressed and hard-driven. Exemplifying the strengths and limits of the Church they served, the Goulburn Brothers laboured heroically, masking the realities of a rural economy which fell short of its early promise and was left further behind as the new century unfolded. They forged with their charges a self-contained, isolated, but for many, a broadening, life-enriching culture. Outside forces beat upon it to little effect as late as the 1960s and 1970s. But changes in the post-Vatican II Church, particularly in perceptions of religious life, a drop off in recruits to the order, rising expectations of schools, changing priorities within the order and a youth culture which diminished the school's formative role all called for a radical re-casting of 'the old College'. This process was begun but incomplete when the end came suddenly in 1999 leaving grief, anger and a search for culprits. St Pat's, for all its localism, is part of a wider colonial and national tapestry. Up on the Hill is a vantage point for much of significance in our religious and social history."--Publisher.